I called to cancel my account on November 1st, after a few years of extremely poor Web hosting service. On December 13th, I noticed an email from Aplus.net that was an invoice, showing they were continuing to charge me.
When I called, I talked to a customer service rep I know only as "Cathy." I explained what had happened, and she asked me if I had made a cancellation request. I told her that I had called and cancelled my account over the phone.in fact, I had called at least three times the day I'd cancelled in order to transfer my domain to my new hosting provider.
She rather rudely said "You cannot cancel over the phone. You have to send a cancellation request via email before any account can be cancelled. I told her that no one had even so much as mentioned anything about a cancellation email that day.
Unfortunately, I had gotten a new computer and no longer had the same computer that I was using when I cancelled that day nearly two months ago, so it was a situation of it being her their word against mine as far as her requesting any kind of confirmation, but since my domain was now hosted with another company, it was obvious what I was claiming was correct, and I then confronted her with that fact.
My new provider that I switched to on November 1st was GoDaddy.com, so my rebuttal to her was to ask why a GoDaddy.com "Welcome to the future home of" welcome page was displayed when she typed my domain name into a browser, and why I was taken to a GoDaddy.com webmail page when I entered my webmail address if in fact my site was no longer hosted through them as she claimed.
Of course, she had no reply and did not even acknowledge me when I asked her those questions. After going around with her and a couple other reps, I went ahead and sent a cancellation request to them at cancel@cs. Aplus.net so that they would not cheat me out of more money by continuing to bill me.
A few hours later, I find an email from them. I expected a cancellation confirmation, but all the message simply said was "Thank you for contacting Aplus.net, a Deluxe company. This is to confirm that we have received your email, " and nothing more. There was no mention of any confirmation that my account had been closed, or that they'd ceased billing my debit card.
Knowing from my experience with them thus far that they would likely claim this email was not a confirmation of cancellation if I called to ask why I was still being billed a month from now, I called to inquire about this.
I spoke to another customer service rep I only know as "Erin, " and he claimed it could take 24-48 hours to cancel my account and receive an email confirmation. He did say he would have the automatic billing turned off.
I told him I appreciated that, but that, considering my experience with them so far, I really can't trust the word of any of Aplus.net's customer service reps, and that I would like to have some kind of confirmation at the very least. He agreed and said he would send a confirmation, plus a transcript of our chat, since I contacted him through their "Live Chat" feature. Much later in the evening, I checked my email and I have received nothing from him.
Notwithstanding the extremely poor service and inept tech support personnel I've put up with the last few years with them, I'm now seeing that their business practices are not just poor, but completely dishonest. It's bad enough dealing with their substandard service, but it adds insult to injury to say the least that they are so evasive when customers finally get fed up and want to cancel their accounts.
When a customer calls to terminate their account, it should be honored immediately, instead of the customer having to send an email to some specific email address and wait two days to see if their account is cancelled.
This is no doubt a scam on the part of Aplus.net. They obviously employ this policy to make it very difficult for a customer to extricate themselves from their horrible company. And seeing all the other reviews of this company online, I realize I'm not the only one that has been a victim of this exact same tactic of theirs.
This company obviously does the same thing to everyone else that calls to cancel their account, counting on them being busy and not immediately catching what they've done. They tell them it's cancelled and that they'll no longer be billed, mentioning nothing of the cancellation request emails, only to continue billing them.
Then, when the customer notices they've been billed for a month, three months, six months or more, it's the customer's word against theirs, and they play the "cancellation request" card to justify keeping the customers money and not refunding them. It's no doubt that they probably make a lot of money off all the customers that want to cancel with them and run from their horrible service.
I would never have recommended this company to anyone before, but after this experience, I would warn anyone to stay away from this company and never deal with these crooked con artists.
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